My favourite links #28

Arts and Letters Daily website

I discovered this website in the interview with Dennis Dutton I included in My media week. According to founder Denis Dutton, Arts & Letters Daily is a web portal for “the kinds of people who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, who read Salon and Slate and The New Republic — people interested in ideas.” A&L Daily’s layout evokes the 18th century broadsheet format associated with The Enlightenment. Three columns of links dominate the site: Articles of Note, Book Reviews, and Essays/Opinions. Each link is introduced with a 25-word teaser. The teasers are often witty and provocative. Examples of this week’s teasers include:

Organ donation, some argue, should be built on altruism, pure kindness to complete strangers. Lovely ideal, but what if it means people die for want of transplant organs?…

In the last years, the financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it. Like the rest of us, they fell for a kind of pseudo-objectivity…

Good Americans don’t seriously question English aesthetic judgments, said H.L. Mencken. Film critic David Thomson has long dined out on that maxim…

The cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a human tendency for religious thinking…

Dutton is a libertarian and Tran Huu Dung, the other editor is more liberal, in the American sense of that word.